Though not inaccessible for the feral goats which flourish, as do the rabbits and foxes.

But it was overgrazed pastoral country (Yankaninna Station, Balcanoona Station, Arkaroola Station) in the early 20th century. The colonialist perspective was that underneath the  ‘uncharted’ or barren land were mineral resources that could be extracted for the development of desert South Australia. The miners (initially the settler pastoralists such as the Greenwoods) were always on the lookout to mine the uranium (BHP and Marathon Resources).

The settler colonial history of this region highlights how much South Australia has been, and continues to be, central in Australia’s nuclear history and it highlights how the nuclear order has been historically entwined with colonialism.

Mining uranium and nuclear was not a post 1945 event. Since the early 20th century South Australians have held out hope (and arguably have done for over a century) that the discovery of radioactive minerals in the state would be transformative — a source of untold wealth that would consolidate the colonial project. Initially (1910) it was radium extraction with Douglas Mawson’s expeditions to search for radioactive minerals in the Flinders and Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges (Mt Painter).

Fortunately, the development of South Australia’s deposits slowed due to a dwindling optimism about the quality of radium on offer in South Australia’s Radium Ridge and Mt Painter for medicine (ie., the radium cure) and the 1930s global economic depression.

For Britain, in the 1930s, obtaining a supply of uranium from within the Empire would assist in bolstering its geopolitical standing in a period of imperial decline and increasing decolonisation. By the 1940s the British Government was desperate to have an uranium supply to make the atomic bomb and maintain  its imperial prestige in a period of increasing challenge. Hence the Australian Government reserving all uranium deposits for Crown uses in the 1940s and the emergence of a coordinated national program of exploitation of uranium deposits in which Mt Painter was significant.

South Australia’s colonial and post-colonial history is deeply involved with nuclear processes – radium and uranium extraction, Britain’s nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and radioactive waste disposal today — and in the development of a nuclear order. SA is central to the development of Australia’s nuclear order and its nuclear ambitions.

It was not until the first decade of the 21st century before it was officially realized and acknowledged that mineral exploration and conservation  were incompatible in the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges. It took a long fight for conservation to win, even though evidence of the Sturt ice age is presented at the Arkaroola Protection Area by one of the finest and largest glacial deposits known anywhere on Earth.

South Australia currently has approximately 25% of the world’s uranium resources, is a major exporter of uranium oxide and is the primary state for uranium. SA has 4 active uranium mines: BHP’s Olympic Dam mine; Heathgate Resources’ Beverley mine between the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges and Lake Frome; Quaser Resources’ Four Mile mine northeast of Leigh Creek; Boss Energies’ Honeymoon mine west of Broken Hill. It also has 3 developing uranium projects: Samphire on the Eyre Peninsula near Whyalla; and Crocker Well and Junction Dam west of Broken Hill. SA is central to the development of Australia’s nuclear order and its nuclear ambitions.

Pages: 1 2